People commonly use a search engine to find companies and evaluate the quality or appropriateness of the companies from reviews. For example, Google and Bing provide general Internet search services, whilst TrustRadius, G2Crowd, and Findthecompany.com provide a service specifically for searching for a company or software. The list of companies may be reduced or focused by the user selecting one or more filters of the company attributes.
The effect of applying a filter is to include satisfying companies and remove non-satisfying companies from the displayed list. The score or rank of the extant companies is not affected by the filter selections. The companies are typically ranked by their own attributes such as revenue, employees, and location or by user ratings.
As a consequence, the effect of applying filters is to reduce the number of companies displayed to the user with the order of the display unchanged.
The inventors have appreciated an advantage of using the filter selection in the ranking algorithm to better reflect the user's query. The present inventors have appreciated an opportunity to address these issues by creating a database of business relationships.